Family/Familiar involves videos and photographs centering around a large industrial sculpture in which a video projector is embedded. The videos and photographs depict scenes of Yamani’s family members preparing for religious rituals within their domestic spaces. In following these everyday moments, the beauty of its ordinariness will be brought to light. Yamani’s observations through the video camera are shaded by the artist’s negotiation of a personal crossroads, as he attempts to reconcile his love for his family members and acceptance of their practices whilst staying committed to his own choices.

While Family/Familiar is a personal encounter with Yamani’s family, it will also delve into complex issues affecting the community at large. The artist points to experiences of exclusion, racism and misrepresentation.

Jamil Yamani works mainly in the area of time-based art but was originally trained as a painter in Austria. He is currently the recipient of the RIPE: Art & Australia/ANZ Private Bank Contemporary Art Award, an award which commissioned the sculptural component of Family/Familiar. Yamani completed a Masters of Fine Arts in Video Production from the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales where he also obtained his undergraduate degree. By 2003, he had been awarded the Western Sydney Artists Fellowship from Arts NSW and was earmarked as a finalist for the prestigious Helen Lempriere Travelling Scholarship. To date, his work has been exhibited at a wide range of cultural institutions from Casula Powerhouse, Sydney to the Sydney Opera House to the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, Perth. He has exhibited internationally in New York, USA, Vancouver, Canada and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Santiago, Chile. For more information visit the artist’s website: http://www.jamilyamani.com.

Paperbark Leaflets at Gallery 4A is Jason Wing’s first solo exhibition. The artist will be employing a paper-cutting technique on old advertising posters gleaned from telegraph poles to create a three-dimensional installation – transforming the Ground Floor of Gallery 4A into a forest of falling leaves and dancing cherubs.

The image of the cherub is based on a photograph of the artist as a boy and represents a child’s perspective on life before adulthood. Previously appearing in Wing’s other works such as A.B.C Aboriginal Born Chinese (2007), G.M.O Genetically Modified Organism (2007) and Year of the Snake (2006), in Paperbark Leaflets, it will adopt a half-animal form with long and elaborate tails. Emanating off the gallery walls and emerging from the old posters on their delicate skeletal frames, they will playfully interact with each other as well as gallery visitors.

Wing sees the act of removing posters from telegraph poles and collecting them for his work as a reference to the traditional Indigenous process of removing bark from trees for painting. His work is concerned with the apparent contradictions which he sees in contemporary everyday life and in his mixed Chinese-Aboriginal heritage. Paperbark Leaflets will explore, in particular, the relationship between nature, man and the urban environment. Wing considers the process in which a tree is cut down, stripped of bark and placed back into the earth ironic, and a testament to the absurdity of contemporary life and times where respect for nature is forgotten by man.

Jason Wing is a graduate of the Sydney College of the Arts and Sydney Graphics College. He has shown in galleries in Australia and overseas since 2006 and won the Off the Wall competition in Sydney (2006), Melbourne (2008) and Brisbane (2008). He was also a finalist in last year’s Next Generation Art at Art Melbourne 07. Most recently his work Message of Faith was selected for the Jesus Walks art initiative, and displayed on the M.C.A. lawn in Sydney. He is currently working as an art therapist, teaching people with physical and mental disabilities at Tallowood School in Kellyville, New South Wales. For more information visit http://www.jasonwing.net.